


quagmire

by That_Ghost_Kristoff



Series: into the desert [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Everyone Has Issues, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Demigod Anakin Skywalker, Gen, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Planet Mortis (Star Wars), That's Not How The Force Works (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:59:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29515677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_Ghost_Kristoff/pseuds/That_Ghost_Kristoff
Summary: A ship malfunction strands Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan on an unknown planet in Wild Space for three days.(AKA The Mortis Arc)
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Series: into the desert [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135958
Comments: 5
Kudos: 95





	quagmire

**Author's Note:**

> I redid Mortis. Enjoy?

It’s still morning, according to the sun’s low position above the furthest eastern peaks. About mid-morning, more than likely, and already, the sultry air is dense as soup and the heat nearing unbearable. The sun is a shining imprint between the stratus clouds, a glowpanel veiled in colourless gauze. Misting clouds drape over the tree canopy, sinking past the highest of the evergreens and hardwoods to condense on the glossy leaves of the understory shrubs and trees, sagging them down with the weight of forming drops. In a steady fall, the droplets _drip drip drip_ from the tips to the forest floor—onto the vibrant mosses and paler sedges, the towering ferns deeper than any cutting of jade, the slick lichen that enwraps ridged bark. A lackadaisical river creeps through the greenery, flowing with an unseen undercurrent towards an unseen sea.

Or, a lackadaisical river _crept_ through the greenery. Crept, creeps. It must be creeping out there, somewhere, but _somewhere_ is no longer _here._

Anakin discovers the mountains and the sun from his position in the canopy while Ahsoka sucks down water from a hydropak, trying to think of anything but the heat and the disappearing river, and Obi-Wan cuts a path back through the ferns, searching for where they went wrong. There’s no wind, no movement in the clouds, but the forest moves. They all hear it—the creaks and the scrapes, the leaves whispering. The forest is animate. It’s visible. A lofty orchid with petals dyed in a flame’s colouration bows to Ahsoka; Obi-Wan cuts through a tangle of ivy and strangler vines swinging from a dwarfed tree’s serrated branches and walks again into the clearing where he left her; Anakin finds the bare summit marking the the rainforest’s edge, the mountain’s flanks decorated in pristine white and splotches of red, and watches the trees shift. Worse is that isolated mountain. With mounting dread, his eyes track molten lava as it leaks in rivelets from side vents in the cone to slip into the trees. From here, it’s sludge, slate grey with bursts of scorching orange or metallic gold. Movement of that, at least, is natural even without a detectable air current, but the thought isn’t comforting. 

Below, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka feel his dread leak into them, burning. Even before they lost R2 and _The Twilight_ and the riverbank where they left it, his mental shields were going the way of the volcano’s summit: the sturdy walls splitting in fissures, weakening the structural integrity to threaten collapse.

They regroup below the tree to share their mutually disappointing news. “It gets worse,” he tells them in the beat of silence following the acknowledgement that their ship is, however temporarily, gone. “We’re not that far from a volcano. It’s erupting. Effusive, at least. So we’re not going to die from it. Probably.”

“Thanks,” Ahsoka says dryly, and clips her hydropak back onto her belt. “So what now?”

“Did you see any sign of other lifeforms?” Obi-Wan asks, but knows the answer even before Anakin explains, “No. Not even non-sentients. They could be on the other side of the volcano, though. I think the other side of either mountain range is just the ocean.” 

Mist sneaks over the mud to twist around their ankles. The clouds bleed down below the canopy and the glossy leaves rain their condensation in the steady _drip drip drip._ It’s just evapotranspiration trapping in the moisture and the heat, Obi-Wan tells himself as Anakin thinks more to less the same. Only that, and nothing more. 

When the fog brushes a tendril down her spine, Ahsoka jumps. “Shouldn’t we be trying to find the ship?” she says, looking left to right, then straight again, back to her master and his old master. “The Force isn’t right here.” 

“No, it’s not,” Obi-Wan says, frowning. “Finding the ship would be the best option. Anakin, have you gotten your commlink working again?”

Anakin hasn’t. Before he climbed the tree, he tried, but his commlink’s modulator sparked once, then died. None of them have been able to track the ship. Whatever’s wrong with the Force could be doing it, except that it doesn’t feel like there’s anything wrong at all. It’s sharper, stronger. The vegetation hums with it. So does the mist. 

Even if there are no lifeforms, the planet doesn’t lack sentience entirely, because the planet _itself_ is sentient. Neither Ahsoka nor Obi-Wan feel it yet, but Anakin has the sense of it slipping into his bones. The planet’s got a heartbeat down its core, and the rhythm of it, he knows, is the rhythm of his own. All this greenery is its lungs and the fog its breath. Around them, this unnamed planet breathes. 

Beside him, Ahsoka shudders. “What’s wrong?” she asks, or more accurately demands. “You’re being twitchy.”

His twitchiness is catching, seeping through his rupturing shields to snag on the edges of theirs. “I think we should keep moving,” he says, and wipes his curls away from where they stick to his forehead. Sweat adheres Obi-Wan’s tunic to his skin, and heat coils with the humidity around Ahsoka’s lekku, weighing them down.

When the orchid behind her shrivels and dies, withering on its greying creeper, they come to the unspoken decision to stay together. As they wander, searching for the river and the ship, their footsteps fade from the moss and mud as quickly as they form, and the branches or ferns they snap regrow as soon they pass through the break. There’s no sign of animal life, nor of edible vegetation. Almost absently, Obi-Wan collects samples: snippets of fanning fronds with long pinnates from a dwarf tree with a woodless rootstalk trunk, multicoloured tongue petals from orchids grown from aerial roots and the veined petals from a flower so perfect it could be drawn, ovoid leaves coated in natural wax. He tucks them in his pack for later analysis, when his equipment is working or when they return to the ship. That will be soon, he hopes—they all hope. The oversaturated _greenness_ of the planet loses its charm when they see the first of the glossy trees bloom all at once into a thousand indigo blossoms, then just as abruptly decay.

Above them, the thick canopy bursts into spiraling flowers the colour of the shimmersilk, which quickly come to rain with the lanceolate leaves down to the earth, before the trees dies inside the parasitic epiphyte throttling them, losing their smooth bark and seasalt hearthwood. Within moments, they’re standing in a forest’s afterimage. Twined, bronzen vines groan from the weight of standing upright in dampening fog without support, dotted with flossy fungus and still retaining the host shape. The petals and leaves littering the earth rot from the edges inward as the moss and liverworts give way to decomposition, leaving dimly glowing amber toadstools behind in their wake. 

It’s not long into the process that they’re all unnerved to varying degrees. The stress is Anakin’s doing as much as the rapid life cycle display, because his shields crumble to dust by the time the mushrooms decompose to slick yellow the colour of sick. 

“ _Force_ , Anakin,” Ahsoka says, rubbing her temple with her fingers as her forming headache evolves from a dull pinch to a sharp pain. “What’s going on with you?”

What’s going on with him shouldn’t be the pertinent question when the wildlife around them is dying in stages, but standing next to him with his shields down is tantamount to standing beside a star. Obi-Wan knows this. Ashoka does not. When Anakin turns to look at them, one hand clutched around the thick vine that acts as the foundation for the erstwhile tree’s foundation, his pupils are wide enough to suggest a head injury. “What?” he says. “You mean you don’t feel that?”

“The thing that’s up with the Force?” she says, lowering her hand to fold her arms, falling into herself. There’s something in the back on her head, squirming in her subconscious, that has nothing to do with her master’s destroyed shields or the look of him, wild-eyed with his clothes and hair mussed, despite the stillness. “Yeah, but—”

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, as wary as he was that night on Tatooine in the moment before the boy called a storm. “What do _you_ feel?”

“It’s after midday,” Anakin says, like it’s obvious, and like that’s an answer. “We need to get to higher ground.”

“Why?” Ahsoka says, glancing to Obi-Wan, who resolutely avoids her gaze. “What about the ship? Do you guys know where we are?”

As Obi-Wan says, “I’ve not the slightest idea,” Anakin, frowning, says, “It’s by the coast. It’ll be fine. We’re not. I think, I think the volcano’s killing everything.”

Scared and trying not to show it, Ahsoka snaps, “But how do you know that?”

Anakin’s grip falls away from the skeleton tree. “You don’t feel that?” he says again, but cautiously, looking from Ahsoka with her folded arms and twisted mouth to Obi-Wan, who fingers at a clipped leaf’s feathered pinnates. 

“Feel _what?_ ” his padawan asks, frustrated at the distinct impression that the other two are deliberately excluding her. It’s not common for Anakin to be obtuse, not like Master Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan, who often revels in a decent riddle, but only when the enigma isn’t Anakin. There’s always something uncomfortable, and more than a little shameful, when he fails to solve the small puzzles that, when cobbled together, form his former padawan.

Gesturing vaguely at nothing but the fog, Anakin says, “All of it, I guess,” still like it’s obvious, like it’s an answer. 

Then earth tremors beneath their feet. The strangler vines to Ahsoka’s right collapse as the structure’s unbalanced weight unsteadies, forcing them to dash uphill, slipping over rotted mushrooms and underbrush to avoid the falling rubble.

After that, there’s not much else to say. 

In the hours that follow, his attention splinters between Obi-Wan and Ahsoka and the planet. The Force is _different_ here, Anakin knows. More vivid, more expansive, more intense. It presses around him and pierces through him. He can feel where the wildlife dies before does and that soon enough, new growth will take hold—where the sun is in the sky and how near it is to moonrise—the heartbeat in the core and the sentience of the fog—the sentience of this rapidfire life cycle—where the ship is, abstractly, and each time the forest shifts, and where to find higher ground. The effusive eruption gains strength, spilling lava with low viscosity down its slopes to flood the valley. By nightfall, all that will be left of the landscape around them is the fog.

Other than the three of them, there are no lifeforms. How keenly he senses that lack, for the first time, does not improve his fraying nerves.

They rest after a second short-lived groundquake, when the sky above the now sparse canopy is a patchwork of smouldering sunglow, ash and jet, and scarlet, sitting back on a boulder that hems a narrow creek. “Nature should not be able to behave like this,” Obi-Wan says, more to himself than to the others, as an echoing crack in the distance announces yet more collapsing trees, or perhaps a break in the volcano’s slopes. “This should be impossible.” 

“Night’s not going to be fun,” Ahsoka says, too exhausted from the humidity and the heat and half a day beside star-bright Anakin for Obi-Wan’s existential ruminations on the scientific significance and how it might advance the Jedi’s studies on the nature of the Force, “is it?”

Anakin leans his head back against a fern-tree’s woodless trunk, its dripping leaves sagging over his shoulder, and forces down a gulp of tepid water before answering, “Probably not. The caves’ll be okay.”

“Caves?” his padawan repeats. “There are caves now?”

“Yeah,” he says as Obi-Wan presses his knuckles against his forehead and closes his eyes. “Northwest. I told you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I—”

A third groundquake strikes, longer and stronger than before, jostling them from the rocks, so Ahsoka and Obi-Wan tumble backward into what had been the creek before the seam of running water folded into the soil, and Anakin pitches to the left, landing hard on his side on a scree bed. For a moment, his head rings and pain shoots through his body as his leg bends badly and his elbow sinks through jagged stones. When the initial sensation clears, he feels Obi-Wan and Ahsoka through the bonds, reaching out for him with their shields relaxed, panicked with the realisation that _Anakin is not here._

He pulls himself to his feet. The boulder is there, but the skeletal forest is below him, trapped below a treeline and drowning in lava rivers that wind over the organic matter they destroyed. At his back is the volcano’s slope, streaked with ruin and bright red and white from luminescent flowers in the shape of sea anemones, and to either side of him, the lava runs. Obi-Wan and Ahsoka are gone.

  
  


From the cave mouth, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka watch the last of the new forest emerge through the unwavering rain. Quietly, she asks, “Do you think he’s okay?” as though some nonexistent animal might hear her. “I mean, I can still feel him, but this place isn’t—good.”

No, this place is certainly not good, but he believes it when he tells her that her master will be all right. “Anakin is more attuned to the Force than the average Jedi,” he adds as her lip snags between her teeth and her gaze strays to the northwest, to the volcano, where the rushing lava’s slowed again from fast-flowing rivers to meandering streams. “It would be preferable if _we_ stay together, though, Ahsoka. We will find him in the morning.”

There’s no suggestion that they attempt to find him tonight; for as odd as the Force was during the day, the feeling pulsating through it now has them both skittish. The sun set with equatorial haste, leaving the two moons alone but visible behind the clouds for just a moment before the rain started, and ever since, every shadow and shape within the gloom seems ready to attack. Though the cave is brighter than the forest must be, as the calcite spars jutting from the karst stalactites and stalagmites carry their own internal light, they can make out enough of the woodland to see that it’s a different type from what they hiked through in the daytime. In the night-time wood, the trees are taller with pointed tops, like the evergreens found on the Alderaanian mountainsides. The air is different, too. Humid, still, but frigid. 

Together, they venture deeper into the cave, following the sound of running water. For a stretch, it narrows to a single-file corridor, before opening to a cavern wide enough to fit the Senate with a ceiling too high to see. “Whoa,” she says, leaning over the stalactites that bracket their ledge to peer down at the lazy river below them. “Do you think that’s safe to drink?”

It’s been hours since they drank the last of their water, and longer since they saw a body of it. “Perhaps if we boil it first,” he says, unwilling to risk discomfort or disease from some unknown impurity. He should collect a sample of the water, too. Perhaps there are lifeforms on this land, but they’re microscopic, their Force signatures floundering under the immensity of what comes from the planet itself.

With a leap over the edge, they reach the black shales that act as the riverbank. There’s no wood, but their survival packs have a full fire-kit for just this situation. Ahsoka coaxes the flames while Obi-Wan collects the water, staying in her sight. The crystals dotting the cavern are birefringent, they discover, the glow of one refracting off another, so the whole space radiates with pinpricks of white light or trembling rainbows. 

“I hope we find the ship tomorrow,” she says, curling her legs to her chest with her arms wrapped around her knees, eyes on the small fire and simmering water as an excuse not to look anywhere else. Anakin’s twitchiness had infected her; her foot jitters against the stone ground, unable to keep still. 

Sighing, Obi-Wan says, “Me too, young one,” and rubs a hand absently over her back the way he would—the way he still does, at times—Anakin when his emotions get the better of him. 

Even at a distance, they feel Anakin’s emotions getting the better of him now. Whether he’s safe or not is indeterminable; the bond is overwhelmed with a jumble of his agitated uncertainty over their wellbeing and distraction from something they’re not allowed to know. 

Eventually, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan snack on hot water and battle rations. They huddle close to the flames in an effort to stay warm, and watch a low fog rise from the underground river. After they finish, she says, “We should refill the hydropaks, probably,” and glares when he tells her to stay where she is while he collects more. “You said we should stay together,” she says. “I’m not useless, Master. I can walk twenty feet.”

“I know,” he says, because he does, as he cards his fingers through his already messy hair, “but I suspect that it would be to our detriment if this fire were to die. One of us should be here to watch it.” 

This is a truth, but not the whole of it. While she seethes over awareness that really, he thinks she’s a liability to the team out here in this strange place—that Anakin must have thought it, too, which is why he refused to answer her questions—Obi-Wan pushes himself to his feet and treks back towards the river. It’s true that she is not useless, and also that he does believe they should stay close to one another, but he’s already lost his padawan, or, no, his _ex_ -padawan, and it simply wouldn’t do to lose his ex-padawan’s padawan in a cave in the night on the edge of rainforest that’s caught between living and dying. Not static states, but processes occurring presently. What do you feel? he asked Anakin. _All of it_. 

Master Qui-Gon, in his final moments, tasked Obi-Wan with guiding Anakin because he was the Chosen One. _All of it_ , Anakin said. That’s the hollow space in the bond: the Force and the planet.

When Obi-Wan crouches down beside the water, he thinks, _Master, I have failed you_ , because he lost his padawan long before they alighted on the other river’s bank. He lost him that morning in the Halls of Healing, when he purposely didn’t tell the boy about his medical results, and again when he acquiesced to the Chancellor’s request for a private meeting. He lost Anakin to Padmé Amidala and to the War, to the Council’s refusal to accept their own culpability when ignorance suits them better, to his own suicidal recklessness. Now, he lost Anakin on a planet where the night-time Force thrums with the threat of the Dark.

Vapour rises, dense and swelling, from the water’s surface. It stinks of used pyrocrackers and a quarry, and is opaque from the high silt content. When he leans over to scoop water into the hydropacks, he catches sight of his reflection beneath the mist, and jumps.

Below him in the water, where his own face should be, is Master Qui-Gon. “Obi-Wan,” says the whisper of the fog in his ear, speaking from behind him, but when he turns, he finds nothing but the swollen mist closed in around him.

“Ahsoka,” he says aloud, trepidation shooting through him to entwine with Anakin’s disquiet. “Ahsoka!”

The haze swallows his call as it wraps around his arms and legs. “Ahsoka!” he tries as it teases through his hair to murmur his name in Master Qui-Gon’s voice. As Obi-Wan tries to retrace his steps, the impression of his late master cajoles him to pay attention. He is _within_ the Force, the voice is saying. They’re here because of Anakin, Anakin who is the Chosen One, Anakin who is susceptible to imbalance because of his unbalanced soul, Anakin who is in danger without Obi-Wan’s inadequate protection, who will place _them_ in danger without Obi-Wan there to temper him, who has just found his way home—

Instinctively, Obi-Wan presses his hands to his ears in an attempt to block the blend of Master Qui-Gon’s voice with his own. Anakin will be all right, he thinks. Anakin has been all right without much help from him. Right now, it’s Ahsoka who Obi-Wan needs to find. Ahsoka will need him, because he already failed her master and can’t stomach the idea of also failing her. 

As he lowers his arms, he calls again, “Ahsoka!” but the unseen calcite spars deflect the soundwaves of his voice as they deflect light, tossing her name about the cave to eddy around him. _Ahsoka_ , says the echo. It says, _AhsokaAhsokaAhsokasokakasokahka,_ but she doesn’t hear.

Ahsoka lost sight of Master Obi-Wan almost immediately, because he walked to the water and she blinked and in the space of that half-second, the river got a bend. From her place by the fire, she watches feeble tendrils of mist grow and shrink as they writhe in the frostwork lacing the end of the new sandstone formation blocking the way he went. This is why they should have stayed together. He said they should first. Leaving her here to watch the fire proves that he only said that to appease her. 

Irritated, she stands, and paces back and forth, back and forth, in a line on her side of the fire. She’s cold, which should be a reprieve from the daytime’s sticky heat, but it only succeeds in aching the recently healed fracture in her wrist. Neither Anakin nor Master Obi-Wan wanted her along on this mission at first, because Kix said she needed to rest more, like either of them ever followed a combat medic’s advice. Once she saw Master Obi-Wan fight for half a day with a graze from a blaster grooved into his leg above his knee, and once she saw Anakin pop back in a dislocated shoulder, brush off Kix, and re-enter a battle like it was nothing. Just because he’s more “attuned to the Force” than the average Jedi and Master Obi-Wan is a proper Master doesn’t give them the right to treat her like a child. 

She is not a child.

She is not weak.

She is _not_ useless. 

With a harsh, whistling exhale, she kicks a pebble with the side of her foot, sending it skating over the black shale to skip twice on the motionless river, before finally sinking. Ripples spread over the otherwise undisturbed surface, drawing her attention to the waterside. For the first time, she sees pale webbing spreading across the bank. It’s not from a spider. It can’t be, when there are no lifeforms on this planet but she and the other two.

Distracted from her thoughts, she inches closer. As she nears, the webbing spreads in a repeating geometric pattern, crawling out from the water and over the smooth stone. It’s a fungus, the latticework its roots with each strand supporting miniscule mushrooms. She drops to one knee, bending for a better look. In a centre of the mushrooms’ caps are a single black dot, like a target or an eye.

She runs her fingers along the toadstools feathering one of the longer root sections. They’re soft to the touch and yield to light pressure. When she lifts her hand away, the notches of her bitten nail snag on a black dot pupil, bursting it open to eject a chalky smoke in her face.

Later, Obi-Wan stumbles out of the fog and back to the campsite, where he discovers the fire burned to ash and no sign of Ahsoka.

  
  


Alone, Anakin walks into the night-time wood. 

Together, up in the western mountain caves, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan watch the last of the forest come to life, but here at the volcano’s summit, Anakin discovers the difference himself. Gone are the smooth-trunk evergreens of reasonable size with the waxy oval leaves, replaced instead by conical trees bearing blue needles and scaly bark that tap the sky. The ferns are still there, but twice his height. Though the humidity remains dense enough to suffocate an unsuspecting victim, it’s also cold enough that the rain is ice. The whole forest smells of that, the sort of cold that foretells a blizzard, and damp wood starting to smoke.

He hears no birdsong in the branches, no woodland lifeform shuffling over the pillowing moss or in the high ferns in search of an escape from the sleet. Without the others, his aloneness should have been absolute, but there’s something else here. He feels it in the mist that dances through the trees and in the earth beneath his feet, in the space in his head where his bonds to Obi-Wan and Ahsoka nestle. There’s something familiar about this place, though Anakin’s never been here before. He knows it with the same certainty that he once knew the angled tilt of his mother’s smile and the warmth of her Force signature. 

In the back of his head, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka’s anxiety for his safety threads into him, joining into his own worry for them. The Force here is Darker than it was when the sun was out, and it was unpleasant enough earlier. There’s no guarantee they’ll make it through the night, and come out the other side with their real selves intact.

Despite the downpour, Anakin bypasses potential sheltering rock formations and heads away from the volcano towards the caves. In the back of his head, as clearly as his bonds, exists a map of this planet to guide him. It’s not something that newly formed when _The Twilight_ shut down and R2 with it on the riverbank. No, it’s always been inside him, and finally has the chance to show itself. 

The mist tangles around his ankles, then up his legs, over his arms and his torso, through his hair and around his neck, his eyes. He stops and blinks, trying to rid himself of the sudden blindness. It breathes against his back. He feels its heartbeat through his ribs. There’s a voice in it that’s not a voice, speaking inside him, saying, _Stay_ , and, _You have come home_ , but also, _Take me with you._

Like that, he thinks of Padmé and his mother, on the night at the homestead, and of how he never wants to see his wife die like that, too. Of how he went ten years without thinking to help his mother because he was dumb enough to misunderstand the obvious, but also of how at least one person should have _known_ to tell him and that the Jedi may not have rented him out to the Chancellor in the traditional sense, but sending him there, alone, for the sake of the budget is just another version of the same concept. That he isn’t doing as well as he should with Ahsoka, that he’ll fail her in end, and that Obi-Wan still treats him like he’s a kid, like he’s delicate—

Anakin doesn’t realise that he’s hyperventilating until a hard object slams down on his head, then tumbles into the mud. When he calms enough to dodge the few following, he registers the assailants as conifer cylinders. They burrow into the ground. The resulting rumble is all the warning he has before fallen seeds sprout.

Automatically, he dashes left, his feet bringing him back east as he avoids the fast growing thicket, and collides with another sapling midway to becoming a tree. He backs away, and finds that one sapling is actually two, their shapes humanoid and branches woven together in a lover’s embrace. 

He stumbles backward once, twice, until his foot hits false ground and the moons reach halfway to the western horizon, marking midnight. The fallen logs behind him decompose into humus, and the peat moss hiding the water table breaks apart. In the space of a heartbeat, the muskeg’s area widens, extending past his other leg to drag him below the surface. He stops, unable to think—he’s always been so terrified of drowning. As the bogland grows, the ferns wither, and the upper canopy flowers and the cones fall and the heartwood rots, killing the surrounding trees from the inside so they crack and collapse, feeding the peat. The sphagnum is slippery beneath his hands when he searches for a lifeline. He’s down to his knees, to his waist. 

In the back of his head, Obi-Wan’s panic spikes in reaction to something other than own. 

_I want to go home_ , Anakin thinks as the muskeg swallows his arms. _I want to go home, I want to go_ home.

The canopy is nonexistent. The rain stops. The water recedes as he watches the stars and moon shift in the sky, the world rotating around him, until the trees and ferns are gone and the bog dry. Suddenly, the volcano with its flowered slopes and effusive eruptions is to his south, and all around him is a plain of ivory sand bordered with a series of disconnected plateaus. There is no rain, nor mist. Anakin has never seen stars so bright from a planet’s surface, even on Tatooine.

Sludge and decaying moss still coat his clothes, acting as a magnet for the sand. Leaving the muskeg behind is a relief, but the shift in location, especially to a desert, is almost as unwelcome. The others are southwest now, further away than they were when he was still in the night-time wood, and the Dark is stronger. There’s a feeling in it like satisfaction. It’s every bad decision he’s ever made, and every terrible thought he’s ever indulged. 

To the north of him, by the coast, is a salt flat that his instincts tell him to avoid, and to the east, a sandstorm’s starting up at the base of the nearest plateau, readying to head south, but away from here. Trees with thick, gnarled trunks disrupt the landscape, along with tufted grasses and unfamiliar herbs. It’s even colder than the forest, a fact that his wet clothes don’t help. Neither Ahsoka nor Obi-Wan are calm, she angry and he despondent, but Anakin will be useless to them if he freezes to death. 

He collects dead wood from the base of a tree, and builds a fire beside a formation of transparent stone and cluster of flowers with toothed leaves and red brachts that smells faintly of crushed ’mum seeds. In the morning, he can look for them, when the Force isn’t purring its seduction into the starlight and the cold won’t frost ribs.

At some point near morning, when the sky’s just starting to lighten but the sun has not yet risen over the plateaus, he drifts into an uneasy doze, but it only lasts a moment. With a start, he wakes, Obi-Wan’s call of “ _Ahsoka!_ ” ricochetting around his head as his bond with his padawan abruptly severs. 

Shocked, Anakin bolts to his feet, his body following his mind’s scramble to find her. He still feels her, he realises after a moment, but only in the way he feels the ship or the river or seksevil groves fruiting near the salt flats—as an extension of the planet. There’s a part of him that’s meant to belong to her, but now it’s empty. A void. He has nothingness sewn over that piece of him, but he can feel, at least, that she’s still alive. More than that, he knows where to find her. 

Around mid-morning, Obi-Wan comes across him at the volcano’s base, materialising out from an inferior mirage. “Anakin?” he says, startled, then grabs him by the arms, hangs his head, and sighs in relief. “It’s really you.”

“What happened to Ahsoka?” Anakin asks, knowing better than to question why Obi-Wan needed to check if he were real. 

“I’m not certain,” Obi-Wan says, withdrawing, crossing his arms. Sunlight dazzles his hair and dapples few unblemished spots remaining on his tunic. “We were in the caves together. I went to collect water—I should have been in her sight—but the geography changed. I found my way back, but she was already gone.”

Anakin shuffles foot to foot, needing to move. “She’s up there,” he says, jerking his head up towards the volcano’s caldera. “We need to go. Now. She’s in trouble.”

Bewildered, Obi-Wan says, “Up there? Do you mean to say Ahsoka is _in_ the volcano? How do you—”

“I just do,” he says, snappish. “Force, Obi-Wan. We need to go.”

A groundquake rolls through the earth, the tectonic movement opening a fissure in the slope’s layers of built-up ash and hardened lava to unleash another side vent. The heat, which was already high, rises. Obi-Wan swears loudly, angrily, but when Anakin starts his way up the flank, he follows without a word. 

The trek is a long one. Though the volcano is low, lower even than the night-time canopy, it lacks a convenient path; the ground beneath their feet is unstable, all black chalk and grey dust; the flowers are unruly with misbehaving roots. Twice, they pause for water and a short rest. Around them, the air reeks of nuna eggs left fallow in the sun. He glances over his shoulder, back to the desert, which prompts Obi-Wan to do the same. Stretching all the way out to the cracked salt flats and silver sea to the north is a plain of goldenrod and rust shimmering from heat haze. The day-time landscape lacks vegetation. It’s as desolate as the Xelric Draw.

When Anakin said he wanted to go home, he was thinking of Obi-Wan and Ahsoka. Instead, the Force dragged him out to the desert.

“I can’t feel her,” he says lowly at the end of the second rest, as evening creeps into the sky over the eastern mountains, fiddling with the cap of his hydropak. “I can still tell where she is, but the bond’s, I don’t know. Dried up.”

What he was hoping for, he doesn’t know, but Obi-Wan’s concerned frown offers no comfort. “The Dark Side was very strong last night,” he says after a pause. “It is unfortunately plausible that there may have been something unseen in the cave with us that took her.”

Scowling, Anakin scuffs his foot, dislodging the silversaber root tangling over his boot. “Look,” he says. “I can feel what’s going on, sort of. I know it sounds insane, but—”

“This planet _is_ the Force,” Obi-Wan says. “You must know that. As you are, well.” He motions in Anakin’s general direction, still frowning his concerned frown, which most decidedly does not help.

“I’m not the Chosen One,” he says, annoyed, as he clips the hydropak to his belt. “I know why Master Qui-Gon thought it. Do you know how many kids on Tatooine don’t have fathers?” 

“Anakin—”

He turns, effectively closing the conversation, and resumes the hike. 

As the taffy-floss sunset burns into dusk, they reach the caldera’s lip. “Ahsoka,” Anakin says, instantly spotting her where she sits on a slab of hardened lava, her back to them. Obi-Wan tries to catch him, cautioning him with his name, before joining him to slip down the collapsed slope to reach her. When they’re nearer, Anakin says, “Come on, Ahsoka, we need to—”

His padawan rises, but the movement isn’t right. Too boneless, too uncontrolled, too like puppets found in roadside shows throughout the Outer Rim. Wary, he hangs back, and feels, now that he allows himself, the self-satisfied Dark curled around her, in her. Possessive. 

Then she turns. 

“Hello, Masters,” she says, an echo in her voice that is unnatural, as Obi-Wan says her name, horrified and distressed, and Anakin swallows down a scream. 

She reopened the bond. 

The Darkness infecting her, squirming the inky blood-shot lines across her skin and colouring her eyes that unwell yellow, floods him. It tugs at the sprouting Dark Side always lodged inside him, enticing it to grow and flower and fruit, to go the way of the planet’s trees. Dizzy from the sensation, he doesn’t notice when she ignites her lightsabers. He doesn’t notice when she launches herself into a frontal attack until Obi-Wan grips his arm and hauls him into a jump, drawing them safely away from her and safely over a lava stream running from the primary vent.

Between the two of them and the planet, Anakin’s mind splits so badly that there’s no room left for himself. His vision doubles when Ahsoka next tries to strike; Obi-Wan saves him twice before blasting her away with the Force, and squirreling them behind a boulder. “Focus,” he says, seizing Anakin’s shoulders tight enough to leave handprint bruises behind. “Be _here._ ”

 _Here_ , he says—here as in the present moment, a concrete entity in a physical body on a planet’s surface, seated back against a rock formed from ten thousand years of hardened lava with ash embedding beneath his fingernails and in the lines on his palms, with the heat from the vents pressing in around him—except that the Force is in his head, scattering him to pieces so he’s flowing from himself and out out out—

Obi-Wan tears him back.

Once second, Anakin is in the roots of the scaly-bark trees, soaking in the water, growing and dying from the rainfall and heat, and in the bunchgrass languishing on the perimeter of the salt flats, in the seeds germinated inside Ahsoka and the fog condensing above the subterranean river; the next, he’s in his body, blinking rapidly at the sight of Obi-Wan’s grime-streaked face as the volcano grumbles beneath them and she rushes them from behind, aiming for his head. Without thinking, Anakin twists around, raises his hand, and tosses her to the ground before she can clear the boulder. Later, he’ll consider how Obi-Wan did that. For now, they need to focus on saving Ahsoka without getting drawn into a fight.

“I think I can get it out,” Anakin says as all three of them get to their feet. She attacks without any sense of tactic; they dodge, once, twice. Before Obi-Wan can say that the Dark Side is not a physical manifestation, he says, “This one is,” and ducks before Ahsoka’s almost wild swing to knock her to the ground.

Though she’s more skilled than most padawan in her position, and despite the Dark Side fueling her, she couldn’t last long against the two of them together. Obi-Wan disarms her shoto as Anakin knocks away her standard saber, pinning her down. She struggles, bodily and with the Force, but between them, they trap her fully in place. The Dark Side _is_ physical here, dancing like some bacterial infection in her organs and blood and inside her optic nerves. _You have no actual experience healing_ , says a whisper in Anakin’s thoughts as he locates the spores, but he ignores his doubt, and rips the infestation out through her throat. 

It comes out of her with a strangled, muffled, continuous shriek that breaks open new fissures and quickens the lava’s flow. It comes out as opaque, swirling smoke that he extracts entirely, containing it in a gaseous sphere long enough to toss down the vent. When it burns, he feels it, its pain searing through him so he collapses sideways, clutching his chest with his eyes shut and his teeth grit. 

By the time the pain lessens enough to him to open his eyes, Ahsoka’s already dead.

Obi-Wan kneels over her, holding her, his hand cupping the side of her face as he mindlessly murmurs the words of comfort reserved for a soldier’s agonised final moments. There’s blood caked across her mouth and down her chin, and her pale eyes stare at his, seeing nothing. Ahsoka is dead. The bond in Anakin’s head is, again, just an empty vacuum. Ahsoka is dead, and he’s the one who killed her. 

When he pushes himself upright, Obi-Wan doesn’t turn. He shouldn’t. He had her, in those final moments. He had to, because Anakin’s the one who killed her.

Ahsoka Tano is dead.

Ahsoka is dead, and it’s _his_ fault.

Ahsoka died bloody and violently and painfully, not in her right mind, because of him. Her body is small in Obi-Wan’s arms. Still limp. Dust and dirt coat her skin and clothes, and a burn from her own lightsaber marks her left lek. Just a week ago, a fracture in her wrist healed. Kix thought she should take a rest. There was no need for her to come along. Anakin decided to give in when she insisted she would be all right. 

Now she’s dead. He killed her.

Before he can stop himself, he spills out, “I can save her,” as the night reaches its midpoint and the two moons align over the caldera to cast light, clear as the sun, over them. 

After a long moment, Obi-Wan lifts his head. “You can’t,” he says as he lowers her to the ash, body laid flat, as though prepared already for a funeral pyre. Anakin’s stomach lurches. “She’s dead.”

“No,” he says, more certain but also more desperate. “No, Obi-Wan, I—”

“She’s dead, Anakin.”

“I can—”

“Even if you could,” Obi-Wan cuts in, quiet and weary, “you would only kill yourself. Would a life not require a life in return, if it were possible? You did your best, but Ahsoka is one with the Force.”

“Not yet,” Anakin says, even as he thinks that frankly, he doesn’t care much about the ultimate result. Ahsoka is young and free and good in a way he never could be, and she deserves better than to die because he thought he could save her. “Obi-Wan,” he says, “let me try.”

“An—”

“Let me _try_.”

Though Obi-Wan hesitates, he stands and moves aside. Clearly, he thinks that this will lead to nothing but further grief, to Anakin needing to learn how to let go of his attachments, but it will work. Even if a life requires a life in return, he won’t accept another outcome.

He sits back on his shins behind her and places his hands on her shoulders, closing his eyes. In and out, he breathes, calming his unsteady heartbeat, and searches for her in the Force. She’s there, scattering. Everything that makes up who she is bleeds out from her body into the air to join with the galactic life cycle, but it’s not complete. The whole of her is still close. Just—incorporeal. 

When Obi-Wan inhales roughly, Anakin hears the sound distantly. He focuses on Ahsoka’s dissolving Force and reassembles it in pieces. Her conscience, her empathy, her creativity, reasoning, compassion, memory, emotion, intelligence, perception, thought. Slowly, he reconstructs who she is, and plants it back inside her. 

She wakes with a gasp and an arch of her back when her heart restarts, jolting back into beating through the shock of the Force returning to her body. “What?” she says as he lets his hands fall away and opens his eyes. “Did I just—did you just—what?”

Confusion and numb terror rush their bond, but he’s so relieved that he only laughs. “Don’t worry, Snips,” he says, standing on shaking legs while Obi-Wan helps her to sit, staring at him, gaping. “You’re doing just fine.”

“Are the stars different?” she says, drinking in the sky with the fervor of someone who thought they would never see it again. Anakin follows her gaze, and discovers that she’s not wrong; the stars, which were unrecognisable earlier, now have the same constellations as Mos Eisley in midwinter. “What in every Corellian hell?”

“Language,” Obi-Wan says, though absently, then curses himself when the caldera groans. “We should leave. Any discussions can be had later.”

That’s reasonable enough, but Ahsoka doesn’t make it far before she almost collapses. After a short argument, she climbs onto Anakin’s back, and faints, unconscious but alive, just as they reach the southeastern edge. He feels her heartbeat through his back, the rhythm timed with his and with the planet’s, and the steady rise and fall of her chest as she breathes. She’s unconscious, which isn’t great, but at least she’s alive.

Together, Anakin and Obi-Wan climb over the cone’s lip and onto the flank, where they pause, taking in the view. Around them and below, sprawled out in every direction across the slope, are nothing but dead flowers and shrivelled roots.

  
  


At noon the day following Ahsoka’s resurrection, Anakin leads the three of them up the river to the ship. It sits, unassuming and utterly untouched, on a grassy bank.

“Everything’s operational,” he says, too exhausted for annoyance, as he powers up _The Twilight_. R2 beeps and chirps beside him, ragging on him for leaving him shut down for two and a half days. “We can leave.”

Obi-Wan drops heavily into the co-pilot’s seat, and fails to card the red clay from his hair, which shines in the harsh light radiating from the overhead glowpanels. “Good,” he says, and exhales shakily. “I did fear there would still be too much interference.”

“Are we sure the planet won’t, you know, pull us back?” Ahsoka asks, leaning over the back of Anakin’s chair as he preps the controls. “I mean, it is haunted.”

“We’ll be fine,” he says, and rubs his eye. “Just hold onto something.”

Irately, the ship squeaks and grates as it pulls free of the waterlogged riverbank. As they gain altitude, teetering despite the lack of wind, the creeping river comes into view as a twisting, vibrant blue stripe striking through the knoll. To the north is the daytime rainforest drowning in fog, the mountain ranges and the isolated volcano; to the south, downriver, is the coast. Despite the distance, that’s where they landed late in the night when they stepped free of the rocks peppering the base. They walked right on a mudflat as cold and humid as the night-time wood just when the tide was rolling out, exposing swathes of grey silty clay and lonely, deserted pools. Obi-Wan, as he took in the expansive wasteland, said, “Was there a purpose to all this?” in a voice drained enough to break anyone’s heart.

By nightfall, the tide rose and so did the temperature, but they found shelter on a patch of dry land beneath the arching roots of a tree grown into the brackish water. Though they meant to sleep in shifts, Anakin couldn’t stop feeling _all of it_ , and by extension, neither could Obi-Wan. They couldn’t block each other out. Their connection was the rawest it had been since Anakin was nine-years-old.

The halophyte grove appears as a roving shroud of oversaturated green above the blue water. In the night, Ahsoka woke in time to see the spirit procession, where the faint silhouettes of lifeforms crossed between the trees, heading inland. _I’m hallucinating_ , she thought. _I really am dead._ She went to ask if they were dead too, but decided against it when she tried to sit, and the pain rocketing up through her body told her that she was very much alive. 

Now, she leans against the back of Anakin’s seat, using it as support, and watches with the others as the white cliffs they passed through when they reached the river’s mouth emerge, then disappear. His hair stinks of wet earth and heat and basic uncleanness, but she’s no better, nor Master Obi-Wan. The planet dirtied them up—gobbled them to bits and spit them out. 

Below, the planet’s features soften to indistinct colours. When R2 beeps, informing them that the chrono is working again, and that also, they have seventeen transmissions awaiting their attention, Anakin says, “Thanks, R-Two. So, uh. Obi-Wan. I guess you’re telling the Council about this too.”

With a vehemence that surprises all of them, Obi-Wan answers, “No one is to learn of this. _No one._ What happened here stays between us. If you two are in agreement.” It isn’t a question. Instead, there’s an edge in his tone daring them to argue.

Ahsoka retreats to the other chair, falling down into it with all her weight. Nausea sweeps through her from memory of the cave and the fight and dying and living, but it doesn’t occur to her for even a second that anyone other than them should learn what happened here. Coming out on the other side of these three days, she now knows what it’s like to give in to the Dark Side—knows how good it feels and how horrible it is when it leaves—and what it would take for her to give into it again. She knows what it’s like for her life to leave her and, maybe worse than that, what it’s like to have someone else take the part of her that determines who she is, and mould it. 

No, she will not be telling anyone what Anakin can do. Though she’s young, and still only a padawan, she isn’t unaware of how the Council and the older Jedi talk about him. If they find out about this, then, well. The result will be even worse than the conversation she helped force him through on Padmé’s sofa. 

“I agree,” she says, trying and failing to catch Anakin’s eye in his reflection in the transparisteel as Obi-Wan watches her, cataloguing how clear her gaze is, even in an impression, and the bandage wrapped around her lek, which she needs because she’s still alive. “We’ll say we were, I don’t know. Stuck on an asteroid with the comms down.” 

“For three days?” Anakin says. 

“For three days,” she repeats.

He’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Thanks,” and guides them into the clouds, through the atmosphere, and back into the cold familiarity of open space. 


End file.
